I spoke to @scotsman.com about social class as a dominant inequality which rarely speaks its name in Scottish politics. Holyrood is dominated by a professional polo class and has failed to meet the trade union movement’s hopes for a ‘workers’ parliament’.

Hot birds, cold beer – just as Virginia would have wanted.

Nearly half of our universities are forecasting deficits. Institutions across the country are closing departments and issuing redundancy notices. The government don’t yet consider this a crisis. How many more jobs must be lost before ministers act?

URGENT - UCU St Andrews Member - Antonis Vradis is on the Qannir La Cirena boat in the Global Summid Flotilla which has been intercepted by Israel Contact your MP and MSP Contact the Principal Please share

It will have taken at least a decade between 72 people being killed at Grenfell by 'systematic dishonesty' and anyone even facing the possibility of being held accountable. It's not even a case of justice delayed, but justice infinitely postponed - Hillsborough all over again.

Please share this advert for the Dr David Summers Master of Research (MRes) Studentship in Scottish Literature @edinburghnapier.bsky.social. Closing date: 31 May 2026. www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

Actually, SHAPE subjects cross-subsidise STEM subjects in most comprehensive UK universities annually through differential central charge or 'contribution' models. It's another reason we're all in the current HE crisis together, whether our own particular discipline is 'at risk' at present or not.

I witnessed this from the public gallery. The weight and pain in the Assembly Hall were palpable. Moving responses from Jamaican, Nigerian and Ghanaian churches.

‘events’

Tell me- if you need to let 2700 of your employees know that they are in danger of being fired, does that means you are good or bad at running your university? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Brilliant to see Rowena Kennedy-Epstein on this list for a biography of Muriel Rukeyser - it will be amazing, I know (and unbelievable to think that it will be the first biography of the endlessly fascinating, and relevant, Rukeyser)

am i mad to think that this whole Streeting/Starmer pyschodrama is manufactured to give the Starmerite Streeting the best chance at seeing off a challenge from the left of Labour by seeming to have broken with Starmer? If Keir has decided to go I would imagine Wes would be his preferred successor...

This should be a scandal, but the government response seems a collective shrug.

Langston Hughes's Popular Front bacchanal, 'Chant for May Day' (1938): Be like the flowers... Life is everywhere for you, When the sap of your own strength rises Life is everywhere. May Day!

Is nobody is immune to Frank O'Hara's charms? Here he is allowing the late great J H Prynne to talk seriously about pleasure & fun – and the place of these, with misery & terror, in the dialectical work of poetry: 'the pursuit of fun was a fragile affair... your friends kept falling by the wayside'.

It's wonderful to see this plan to open a new radical bookshop in Newcastle - Books from Below. A worthy successor to (among others) the 1930s People's Bookshop on Westgate Road (home of the northeast committee for British supporters of the International Brigade). Four days left to support!

This is absolutely brilliant news; while funding for UK PhDs is very difficult, funding for Masters is almost non-existent, meaning many students self-select out of academia (it's why I went abroad for mine). It's wonderful to think that I might be able to direct students towards this in the future.

Not to be too Angela Carter, but I think I might really be in love with this young fox who keeps coming to look in through my bedroom window 💔

Fully funded Bloomsbury PhD studentship (SOAS/Birkbeck): Queer Meaning-Making in South Asian Literature: New Comparative Perspectives. Supervised by Anandi Rao & me. Application deadline 6 May. www.soas.ac.uk/study/studen... 🌈🎓

a tiny consolation to realise that the hated head-bucket currently being worn by my poor beloved dog is actually called an Elizabethan collar!!

It just never ends.

The lack of public accountability of senior managers (with those pay rises & reliance on management consultants) across the UK HE sector is a scandal comparable to the privatisation/corporatisation of other public services; universities are now ultimately ruled by former bankers & their worldviews.

🚨 1 in 4 staff at Goldsmiths to be axed. All while senior management get eye-watering pay rises and £16m is spent on consultants and lawyers. This is the reality of Higher Education in the UK. Our members have voted for industrial action, support them. www.ucu.org.uk/article/1447...

The wonderful Lavender Menace in Edinburgh are doing a fundraiser to support their operating costs! They've been able to do so much as a staffed organisation - it will be so good for queer life in Scotland if they can keep going: www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/save-laven...

In what (I hope!) will be the first in a series of events taking To the Lighthouse *back* to Skye, Bethan Roberts and I will be leading a workshop in Portree on Tues 5th May, reflecting on how Woolf's novel resonates with sustainability, housing, and tourism today atlasarts.org.uk/programme/to...

This goldfish breaking the fourth wall from its bowl with a reflection of a window to the outside world (in James Cadenhead’s 1886 ‘Lady with a Japanese Screen’ at the wonderful Edinburgh City Art Centre) is like a whole modernist novel in one morose fishy gaze.

UCU Edinburgh picketers finding the sun in George Square on the first day of this week‘s strike @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social

We're on strike again! You can read more about why here: www.ucuedinburgh.org.uk/blog/d8mewmx... University management not sticking to their word? Who would have thought it? Please spread the word!

UCU Edinburgh STRIKE✊🩷

As @ucuedinburgh.bsky.social begins a week of strikes, against massive, unnecessary cuts, and while senior managers still receive fat-cat style pay rises and perks (despite what to external eyes looks like mismanagement), I wonder if this kind of example might begin to prick their consciences?

On 16th April, join me and @peterjcherry.bsky.social for a webinar on the travel grants and research support available for UK university students via the @thebiaankara.bsky.social - biaa.ac.uk/events/webin...

On the one hand, more power to these students, on the other - I am meant to be giving a lecture on The Lonely Londoners in this building this afternoon😞

#OtD 27 Mar 1943 gay anti-fascist Willem Arondeus led a group in bombing the Amsterdam Public Records Office that Nazis used to identify Dutch Jews. Arrested, before his execution, Arondeus wanted it to be known that "homosexuals are not cowards." stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9931...

Edinburgh staff urge university to ditch OpenAI deal: www.timeshighereducation.com/news/edinbur...

today’s dawn chorus: blackbirds, robins, blue tits, great tits, sparrows, wrens – and some nest-building magpies putting them all in their place.

#InternationalWomensDay Helen Carr (1940–2025) was one of the outstanding modernist scholars of her generation, and a longstanding member of the London Modernism Seminar Join us on 9 May 2026 for a roundtable discussion dedicated to the memory of our dear friend and colleague BOOK NOW 👇

Ambivalent about much of IWD, but any excuse to post some Jill Posener

Via Jamaica Gleaner: "Retired former Prime Minister P.J. Patterson is calling for African and European nations that have benefited from Cuba’s decades of international solidarity to now stand in support of the Caribbean island." Read more: jamaica-gleaner.com/article/news...

“For Domingo, however, the pen was the primary tool he chose to campaign with throughout his life” Red and Black in Harlem and Jamaica by Peter Hulme and Leslie James reviewed in Morning Star: morningstaronline.co.uk/article/comp...

In honor of the publication day of The Enclosures of Free Verse (uncpress.org/978146969306...), here's a little thread about what the book does and does not offer.

The John Hope Franklin Research Center is pleased to share that the archive of philosopher, scholar, and author Sylvia Wynter will be opened to the public beginning March 3 blogs.library.duke.edu/rubenstein/2...

On my way to strike and picket this morning at (checks notes) Edinburgh Napier University, over (checks notes) redundancies in the institution barely a year after Prof Nolan's departure...

May Labour's Yvette Cooper, the former Home Secretary, be remembered always as the politician who imposed the ban at the behest of Britain's powerful weapons industry, so it could continue to profit from the deliberate massacre of the people of Gaza

What a turnout! Great to join @ucu.org.uk @unisontheunion.bsky.social & @unitetheunion.bsky.social and students at University of Essex taking action to save jobs in Colchester and Southend. Time for the University to rethink its plans and engage positively with staff & their unions.

anyway the consultation shuts tomorrow, one minute to midnight UK time: www.gov.uk/government/c... Amnesty have some good guidance here. Go on: media.amnesty.org.uk/documents/Am...

my unpopular basic opinion that I will probably delete is that sport has a grossly outsize place in our current world– eclipsing other forms of fun, pleasure, community & how we experience nature– and its valorisation of competitiveness & physical strength are a large part of why we are where we are

DREAM job: two-years of full-time research on Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness and its various histories www.jobs.ac.uk/job/DQI985/r...

In contrast to all those Ivy League professors who seem to have spent their careers aspiring to mix with people like Epst*in, Chan and Natalie Zemon Davis are the humane, principled, and truly brilliant academic role models we should be looking to.

PUB DAY of In the Spirit of H. Chandler Davis, the remarkable set of essays inspired by the UMich prof fired in 1954 for refusing to testify to HUAC. The book’s 12 contributors argue against the suppression of protest, the policed campus, and other enemies of academic freedom. disobediencepress.com